 Pet hate Some places ban pets; some landlords refuse to let tenants own pets; some bars or shops might not allow them in. But under US law, service animals — guide dogs for the blind, for instance — must be allowed to accompany their owners. Recently, that law has been expanded in many places to include “emotional support animals,” which help people with mental health problems: So if a depressed person finds her dog makes her feel better, her landlord must let her keep it. “Clinically and scientifically, this is great,” says the psychiatrist Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten. “Legally, it’s a racket.” To get your pet declared an emotional support animal, you need a psychiatrist to write a letter saying that it is. But there’s no sensible system of evaluation, and even if the psychiatrist decides not to sign the letter, third-party organizations will definitely sign it anyway for $100: It’s “an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep.” Alexander has no solutions, but “I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever.” Phoning it in Everyone’s very worried about kids and phones at the moment. Some places, notably France, are considering banning younger children from accessing social media. And recently, fuel was added to the fire by a widely publicized, albeit unpublished, study which purported to find that schools in Norway which banned phones on the premises saw a 29% reduction in students’ mental health symptoms, a 43% reduction in bullying, and an improvement in grades. The psychologist Chris Ferguson, on his Substack Secrets of Grimoire Manor, though, notes one or two caveats. First, the highlighted figures might seem impressive — 29% sounds like a lot! — but they’re actually “tiny, statistically speaking,” and, by the conventions of scientific publishing, indistinguishable from a fluke. More importantly, most of the schools studied never actually banned phones: “Most simply required students to set their phone to silent mode during class.” The study adds little to the smartphones-and-teens debate, says Ferguson, but it is a further demonstration of “how low the bar is for evidence as regards to our current social media panic.” Sweet science The physicist Richard Feynman once said that “a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” But scientists — and scientific institutions — love to get involved in nonscientific questions. This month, the mathematician Oliver Johnson notes on his Substack, Scientific American published an opinion piece about campus protests over Gaza. “The piece is fine, I think, on its own terms,” says Johnson. “However, I think that it’s wrong and damaging for it to appear in this venue.” Questions about politics and morals “aren’t questions like ‘what is the mass of the proton?’ or ‘what is the effectiveness of this vaccine?’, which can be resolved by experiment and data,” says Johnson. Science doesn’t take place in vacuum, but scientists should be careful not to “blur the line between science and activism any more than is strictly necessary … if we as a community are to retain the trust of the general public.” |
